


Climbing Back Down The Ladder

by JasonBall34



Category: Artemis Fowl - Eoin Colfer
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-20
Updated: 2020-10-20
Packaged: 2021-03-09 02:48:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,411
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27117046
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JasonBall34/pseuds/JasonBall34
Summary: Contains spoilers for The Fowl Twins Deny All Charges. Basically, I've extrapolated and created a scene based on a couple things referenced in the new book. It's a one-shot until it's not.
Relationships: Artemis Fowl II/Holly Short
Comments: 18
Kudos: 34





	Climbing Back Down The Ladder

_Perhaps I should climb back down the ladder_. _To a simpler time when it was just Artemis and me against the world._

Holly Short sat at a table in the nearly empty LEP break room, snacking on some veggie chips as she contemplated her life choices. She found that the chips promoted more focus in her trains of thought. Something about the rhythm of the crunching sound. And after all that had transpired with the Fowl twins' latest antics, she needed all the focus she could get.

"Will you please stop your crunching?!"

The veggie chips also had the added benefit of driving Trouble Kelp up a wall.

Holly turned to the good commander, the break room's sole other occupant. He was sitting at a neighboring table. "Sorry boss." She immediately proceeded to bite down on another chip. "So, how's the reading?"

Trouble let out a whimper. He looked like a broken elf. "This report… It's 200 pages, Holly. Single spaced. I'm going to die surrounded by paperwork."

Trouble had filled the surfaces of several tables in the room with scattered pieces of hard copy report on the latest Fowl incident. He was in the center of it all, struggling to make sense of it. "And worst of all, it's in comic sans!" He attempted to chuck a sheet of paper across the room, but it just did a pirouette in the air and floated back to him.

His eyes were bloodshot from too many hours squinting at the pages. And he looked as if he hadn't slept in 24 hours. Which he hadn't. "Please don't let me die here, Holly."

"You're the one who wanted the bare-bones report, might I remind you."

"Yes, but I had no idea the extent of the chaos! I thought it would be a cut-and-dry, 'the twins flew to Florida and back, got bagged by a dwarf, blew up a building, and went home.' Instead, I've got sub-reports here from seemingly every department under Earth! Even LEP Animal Affairs submitted a transcript of an interview they conducted with a dolphin named _Eh-eh-eh-Blooeee_ about his involvement! What a mess!" He gestured wildly about the room. He had chosen the break room to dive into the case file simply because it was the only room with enough tables to lay out the documents.

Holly popped another chip into her mouth. "Uh-huh. Just wait until you get to the part about the kreperplont vinesuit in the Atlantic."

Trouble couldn't believe his ears. "What?"

"We had to call an Atlantean Elf LEPretrieval squad up from the Deeps to help us wrangle the sucker. It took the better part of a day."

"Really?"

Holly looked down into her biodegradable bag of chips and frowned. It was empty. "Yeah... Oh, and Beckett Fowl can talk to it."

"Ha-ha, very funny."

"I'm serious."

"Is that even possible?"

"Apparently so." Holly tossed the chip bag into a recycler that was across the room. Her aim was true. "Oh yeah, and Foaly wants him brought down for an MRI to see how he can talk to so many things without even having fully developed vocal cords. He shouldn't even be able to make the sounds he does. Foaly says Beckett might have adopted some physical characteristics of that ghost that possessed him."

"I am not buying this for a second."

"Mm. Well, enjoy your reading." Holly stood to leave, having finished breaktime snack.

Trouble got an odd look in his eye. "Wait. Sit down."

Holly did so. "Commander?"

Trouble took a deep breath. "All this is just so fantastical… impossible even. That is, for everyone alive but one."

"Sir?"

"Are we sure Artemis Fowl is in space?"

The implications of the question hung in the air. And Trouble seemed to be mostly serious. For once, Holly was grateful for her acquired political skill of sidestepping questions.

"Well, sir," she began. "Honestly, the fact that there's now a second and third human out there capable of bringing about Convergences is the most troubling line of thought in my view. We have literally no way to predict what kinds of things can happen when they're involved." It was true. With Artemis, at least the LEP had the sense every time that he was probably up to something no good. But with Beckett, one day he could start a nuclear apocalypse if he were to sneeze in the general direction of Madagascar, for all they knew.

Kelp nodded in agreement, his mind spinning at the possibilities. He was the leader of the most powerful military force in the world, whose actions could determine the world's fate. But how was he supposed to keep the world safe from things no one had even imagined possible?

At last, he imparted some commanderly wisdom: "I'm going to lie down on the sofa in my office for an hour. Bring me two kilos of raw chocolate, then no interruptions."

The world was in good hands.

* * *

Holly took the Stick home at the end of the day. There was barely anyone else on the conveyor belt, due to everyone and their brother being at the first crunch-ball game of the season over at Westside Stadium.

As she rode across town, she could even hear the booming beatboxes from the crunch-ball game’s half-time show, blasting some hit F-pop song or another that the youngsters found appealing for some reason.

She also passed a group of conspiracy theorists waving signs at unfortunate public transit riders. The latest hit conspiracy theory was that humans didn’t actually exist, and that the Council had made them up their existence in order to stay in power and keep fairies underground as a form of oppression. _Underearthers_ , they called themselves. Holly had half a mind to introduce them to her good friend Butler, but unfortunately that wasn’t possible. Or ethical.

After reaching her block, Holly hopped off the Stick with the practiced ease of a born-and-bred Haven City elf. There was a weekly segment on a popular late-night talk show dedicated to videos of unaccustomed tourists falling on their faces while mounting or dismounting the Stick, but Holly would never appear on it.

After a short walk through the neighborhood, she reached her home, a modest house in the suburbs she had recently been able to afford thanks to her promotion to Commodore. She had never really imagined herself as a homeowner in the suburbs, but there were two very good reasons she had made the move.

Reason number one: The Foaly residence was on the same street. Before, whenever Caballine would call 909 after Foaly blew something up, emergency response was always several minutes away. After Holly’s move, though, whenever Caballine needs to call for help with containing her husband’s mad-science experiments which invariably go wrong, there’s an LEP officer (and a friend) within dwarf-spitting distance. And Caballine holds the record for the most 909 calls under the earth.

Holly walked up to her door. The house security system scanned her key card, fingerprint, and mismatched eyes to authenticate her identity, and it also tested her breath for DNA before disengaging the fancy lock on the door. As a favor, Mulch Diggums had consulted on her security system in order to ensure defense against the best housebreakers in the business. Since Mulch was, of course, the best housebreaker to have ever existed (self-proclaimed), any lock he couldn’t pick was a lock no one else could, either.

After it was decided during Holly’s ‘security design’ conference call (which she had vainly protested the existence of) that her house would be DNA-encoded, Mulch had said: “Cool. Now, the only way anyone’s getting in there is if they cut off your finger. Surely no criminals are cold-hearted enough to do _that_.” Artemis had been on the conference call and heard every word. He got revenge by openly discussing with Foaly a potential new weapon that could spontaneously trigger a dwarf’s “trimming the weight” biological response on that same call. The mere thought of it had sent Mulch to the bathroom running.

Holly entered her house, pocketing her key card. She hung up her coat, straightened her auburn fringe in the entryway mirror, and strode into the dining room.

Artemis Fowl, seated at her dining table, looked up from his PowerBook. “Good evening, love. How was work?”

Reason number two for buying the house in the suburbs: It would have been much harder to hide a human occupant in her old apartment.


End file.
